Chinese wedding

There is no another country and nation so greatly devoted for its traditions. There are a great number of Chinese traditions about each phenomenon they have in their lives. A family is a phenomenon of great importance for Chinese people and so they care much about marriage and wedding. The Chinese wedding lasts for a long time from the day of engaging till the wedding day. It usually takes several moths or even more for Chinese people to get married. And there is no way for them to neglect any of the traditions and to neglect the value of marriage.

So, the Chinese wedding starts with engaging. A man chooses a woman he wants to marry with. There is no way for him to visit her house with his proposal, there special people who have to inform a family of bride about his intentions. There use to be matchmakers, but the part of matchmaker may also be performed by relatives of fiancé. So, a message is send for bride's family with eight hieroglyphs and date of fiancé's birth. That date is send to a fortune-teller whose task is to detect whether the marriage will be happy. Once the positive answer is received, a massage with bride's date of birth is sent for a fiancé's. the same is performed with that date.

Once the positive answer of the fortune-teller was received by fiancé the special card was placed on the family chancel. The card has to be there for three days, and if something wrong happened during those three days the engaging was stopped at once. Though, it wasn't allowed to refuse or to accept the proposal, as it was considered as bad manners. In case if the engaging was successful the gifts were sent for bride by the family of fiancé. As a rule those presents was some jewelry. Also the wedding agreements were sent from one family to another. Those agreements were written on the red paper, as red was considered as happy color. Message for man was decorated with a dragon and a message for a girl was decorated with phoenix.

The most unbelievable peculiarity of Chinese wedding deals with bride's preparation. She was obliged to sing songs in which she greatly regretted about leaving her home and family. It also was okay to yell about her husband, about matchmakers and family of her future husband. He was allowed to say a number of rough words about all those people, and it was okay. Another fancy fact is that bride had to remove all hairs of her face, including eyebrows. It was like she renovated herself for her future husband.

There was no wedding dress common for us. Bride was dressed up red short gown decorated with flowers. It was a common dress for a bride. The red color was a color of happiness for Chinese people and so, most stuff connected with wedding ceremony was of red color. In the night before wedding night, someone had to sleep in the bed of bride, as it wasn't okay that bride's bad remains empty. As a rule this person was unmarried brother or sister of fiancé or bride.